


you can't go and i can't stay (but maybe there's another way)

by adversarya



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, here have a million and one, yes i realize there are a million of these
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 08:58:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13244886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adversarya/pseuds/adversarya
Summary: He offers the galaxy. She doesn't want the galaxy. (But oh, how she wants him.)





	you can't go and i can't stay (but maybe there's another way)

She can’t stay with him. 

He won’t go with her.

She wants to be able to hate him for it, but she can’t. Taking him to the Resistance would be the right thing, she supposes, but she might as well put a blaster to his head. He is far beyond redemption in their eyes. Leia might be the most powerful figure the Resistance has, but even she would not be able to stop the call for her son’s execution. 

Rey does not want to see Kylo Ren executed. Knows she could not bear to see Ben Solo die. Just the thought of it alone sits poorly in her stomach, bile rising to her throat. 

In the whirlwind that has been her life since that fateful day BB-8 crossed her path, Rey has thought she wanted many things. Her parents, vengeance for Han Solo, training from Luke Skywalker, a larger role in the Resistance. Peace and hope and light. She tells herself she wants these things still, because she knows she should. 

But wanting him is different. It comes from deep within, a want not just of the flesh—though Rey knows she hungers for that too, she is no child—but of the soul. More than anything she wishes she did not yearn for him, that her heart did not burn for his presence like her lungs did air.  But that is how she knows this wanting is truly hers, more her own than any desire she has felt before. She cannot doubt its truth because she does not want it. It would not linger as it does if it were false. If it were a machination of Snoke’s it would not thrive with his life extinguished like the remnants of a candle.

Kylo—Ben—some parts of this are so confusing, but when he holds out his hand she _knows_ that he wants her. All of her, for he has seen her soul and she his and he does not flinch from any of it, not the way Luke Skywalker did on Ach-To, not the way she knows her friends would if they had seen the way she ran straight into the arms of their enemy without even the slightest semblance of a plan. She imagines Finn stumbling upon them in her cabin instead of Skywalker. His horror. They would all be the same in that. 

She studies Ren’s outstretched hand. It shakes. Not just from excess adrenaline, but fear. _He thinks I will reject him_ , Rey realizes. For at his depths he is the boy who couldn’t convince his father not to leave nor his mother to stay. _Never enough_. In this they are the same. 

He offers her the galaxy, but she does not want it. Yet she cannot bear to fight in a war where he is on the other side. They could be beacons in this war, but there would be no room for _them_. 

The way forward is clear.

She does not take his hand, but goes to him and runs her own fingers down the side of his face as she has wanted to since arriving on this monstrosity of a ship. She can feel the heat radiating from his body, can imagine it soothing the pain of over a decade spent so incredibly alone.  

“We belong together, Ben,” she tells him, feeling as if she might as well be holding out her beating heart in cupped hands. “I don’t want the galaxy. I just want _you_. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

He looks at her with the suspicious eyes of a boy used to disappointment, so she presses her palms against his temples and _shows_ him—not the vision manipulated by Snoke, but her dreams afterwards, not products of the Force but the yearnings of her heart. She shows him her longing, her desire, her hope, her fear. _Please understand_ , she thinks.

His eyes, closed tight to focus on the images she had projected to him, flutter open once more. They look suspiciously wet and Rey knows she has succeeded.

“Come with me,” Rey pleads. “Not the Resistance. Just me. Just _us._ ” 

“Where?” he asks.

Rey hesitates for a moment. All she really knows of the galaxy is Jakku and Ach-To and glimpses of other green planets that blur together in her mind.

“Away,” she finally says, convinced that the galaxy is a big enough place to have a place where they could fit. At heart, she is still a scavenger, and good at finding things. 

“You would abandon your precious friends?” he sneers. “Your noble cause?”

She can see through him clear as window glass. 

“I would choose _you_ ,” she corrects. _Choose me_.

He does.

**Author's Note:**

> have An Idea for how this might continue; if there is any interest please let me know


End file.
